Minister to Freedom

About the Author

On July 30, 1776, British troops, flush with bravado as they
prepared to run George Washington's battered army off of Long
Island, burned the general in effigy. Alongside Washington they
torched the figure of a minister, the Reverend John Witherspoon.
"An account of the present face of things in America would be very
defective indeed," complained an English officer, "if no mention
was made of this political firebrand, who perhaps had not a less
share in the Revolution than Washington himself." That wasn't just
sour grapes. As much as any figure in the colonial era, Witherspoon
embodied the explosive alliance between faith and freedom that
would inflame the American struggle for Independence. Not long
after becoming president of the College of New Jersey (later
Princeton), he was accused of turning the campus into a "seminary
of sedition." Following a weekend visit, John Adams called him "as
high a son of liberty as any man in America."

Few could have seen it coming. A native of Scotland, Witherspoon
spent his early years of ministry preaching and teaching. In
September 1758, from the Abbey at Paisley, he rebuked pastors for
getting entangled in public affairs. He called it sinful and
reckless for them "to desire or claim the direction of such matters
as fall within the province of the civil magistrates." Twenty years
later the same minister would help persuade the American
Continental Congress to keep General Washington and his army up and
running.

No religious figure of the era exerted greater influence on
national politics. Witherspoon's mailing list included the likes of
Alexander Hamilton, John Adams, Ben Franklin, and Benjamin Rush. He
signed the Declaration of Independence-the only cleric to do so-and
lost a son in the Revolutionary War. As a state legislator and
delegate, he helped ratify the Constitution. And as the principal
instructor at Princeton, he groomed a generation of men-including
James Madison-for leadership roles in the new nation. Historian
Garry Wills has called him "probably the most influential teacher
in the entire history of American education."

Not in recent memory has the nation's political culture seemed more
primed for-or needful of-the statesmanship of a John Witherspoon.
President George W. Bush is making the redemptive work of religious
organizations a central feature of his domestic agenda. In so
doing, he and his allies apparently hope to reestablish the
historic link between robust faith and a healthy civil society. As
they continue to collect and fend off their critics, there is much
to be learned from the Princeton divine.

Preamble to Liberty
Witherspoon entered the ministry precisely when Scottish
Presbyterianism was in schism. One faction, the so-called
Moderates, levered the British patronage law to get the upper hand
over the more conservative Popular Party, or evangelicals, in the
church's General Assembly. The young minister emerged as a leader
of the evangelicals, who defended the rights of congregations to
elect clergy and control their own affairs. The divisions got ugly.
Armed soldiers forced ministers on parishes; others were deposed.
There were riots. Thousands bolted from the Church of Scotland.
Witherspoon, while strenuously defending orthodox doctrine, became
known as a conciliator.

These ecclesiastical outbursts were not occurring in a vacuum. In
1747, when Witherspoon attended his first General Assembly meeting,
Francis Hutcheson was busy launching the Scottish Enlightenment
with his philosophy of "Common Sense." David Hume was proofreading
his Essay Concerning the Human Understanding. And Adam Smith was
teaching literature and likely gathering material for The Wealth of
Nations. The Moderates in the Scottish church, says one historian,
were "only another expression of the general stir of intellectual
liberty of the eighteenth century."

For the Calvinist cleric it was a bit too liberating. Enlightenment
theology tended to cast off orthodox doctrine and flatten
Christianity into an ethical system. Nevertheless, Scotland's
social and intellectual elite eagerly embraced the new ideas.
Alexander Carlyle, for example, claimed that Hutcheson possessed "a
fervent and persuasive eloquence which was irresistible." There
were lessons in all of this ferment, ones that Witherspoon would
carry with him across the Atlantic.

Faith and FreedomAmerican Presbyterians were trying to quiet their own
doctrinal squabbles. When the president's post opened at the
College of New Jersey, an incubator for Presbyterian ministers,
church leaders turned to Witherspoon. After two years of
negotiating, he agreed to come. His main task when he arrived in
Princeton in 1768 was to get the college on a firm financial
footing. That required fundraising trips throughout the
colonies-and constant exposure to the temper of the times. "A man
will become an American," he concluded, "by residing in this
country three months … more certainly than by reading or
hearing of it for three years, amidst the sophistry of daily
disputation."

Along with the disputations came the Boston Tea Party, the closing
of Boston Harbor, and the "Coercive Acts" of Parliament in March
and April of 1774. That year Witherspoon joined 72 representatives
from New Jersey to help elect state delegates to the first
Continental Congress. In June 1775, shortly after armed fighting
broke out at Lexington, he drafted a pastoral letter for the
Presbyterian Synod of New York and Philadelphia. It gave
unqualified support to the Congress and warned that if British
aggression continued, "a lasting and bloody contest must be
expected." According to one historian, the letter "changed the role
of the Presbyterian clergy from uncommitted observers to active
supporters of the revolution." A year later, Witherspoon joined the
Congress as a delegate and led the movement in New Jersey to depose
the royal governor.

There was nothing extraordinary about preachers in the
Revolutionary era getting mixed up in politics. Many served in
state legislatures; quite a few used their pulpits to put an
apocalyptic spin on current events. What distinguished Witherspoon
was his steely logic about the bond between faith and freedom. In
Witherspoon's most famous sermon, "The Dominion of Providence Over
the Passions of Men," he joined political and religious liberty at
the hip. "There is not a single instance in history in which civil
liberty was lost, and religious liberty preserved entire," he
warned. "If therefore we yield up our temporal property, we at the
same time deliver the conscience into bondage."

Indeed, Witherspoon went even further: He made piety indispensable
to republican government. Virtually all the Founders, even the most
secular-minded, praised the social utility of religion. But few
argued as effectively as Witherspoon about its ability to keep a
free people from plunging into chaos. "Nothing is more certain," he
said, "than that a general profligacy and corruption of manners
make a people ripe for destruction." The remedy: "He is the best
friend of American liberty who is most sincere and active in
promoting true and undefiled religion."

Witherspoon was not a charismatic speaker-"no flowers in my prose,
or in my garden," he liked to say-but his "Dominion" sermon was a
rhetorical gem. Delivered in May 1776, it captured the mood of the
colonies and was widely distributed. William Warren Sweet, dean of
American church historians, has called it "one of the most
influential pulpit utterances during the whole course of the
war."

Two months later Witherspoon signed the Declaration of
Independence, pledging with his compatriots "our Lives, our
Fortunes, and our sacred Honor." By November the vow was put to the
test. Word came that the King's troops were headed toward
Princeton. Witherspoon was forced to cut the term short, dismiss
the college, and flee with his wife and family. Washington and his
army marched through town on December 2. Within a week a brigade of
British troops arrived, quartered themselves in the empty college
building, and staged the battle of Princeton.

The Christian StatesmanPrinceton would play host to another battle, this one a
war of ideas. The crisis with Britain had created the need for a
new breed of social leader: a political leader able to engage the
vital issues of the day, while brokering political differences. "In
1740 America's leading intellectuals were clergymen and thought
about theology," writes historian Edmund Morgan. "In 1790 they were
statesmen and thought about politics."

No religious figure was more crucial to this transition than
Witherspoon. Here again his fight against the Moderates in the
Scottish Church would prove fateful. Witherspoon was not timid
about taking intellectual challenges head on. Indeed, he often
warned his students against using spirituality as a mask for
anti-intellectualism. "We see sometimes the pride of unsanctified
knowledge do great injury to religion," he said in an address to
the senior class. "On the other hand, we find some persons of real
piety, despising human learning, and disgracing the most glorious
truths, by a meanness and indecency hardly sufferable in their
manner of handling them."

Moreover, the intellectual contests washing onto American shores
were inescapable; they touched politics, philosophy, and religion.
To counter them, Witherspoon put in place rigorous courses in
rhetoric and moral philosophy. He introduced the lecture system in
American colleges. He bought state-of-the-art scientific equipment
and greatly expanded the college's library. His grammar school soon
became one of the best in the colonies.

In his Lectures in Moral Philosophy, a required course, Witherspoon
articulated a system of social and political ethics drawn both from
his Calvinist tradition and the seventeenth-century English Whigs.
Locke's Two Treatises of Government (1690), which found a place in
Witherspoon's personal library, was mandatory reading. He also
borrowed heavily from Hutcheson, his old nemesis, in emphasizing
man's moral sense and capacity for virtue. Indeed, Witherspoon
grappled all his life with Common Sense philosophy, scorning its
rosy view of human nature, yet willing to use reason as an aid to
revelation. "If the Scripture is true," he said, "the discoveries
of reason cannot be contrary to it, and therefore, it has nothing
to fear from that quarter." With Witherspoon's synthesis, "a force
was present at Princeton which would combat the products of
eighteenth century rationalism." Indeed, he instigated the most
important response to the Enlightenment in American higher
education.

Witherspoon had a politician's keen sense of the moment. He rightly
envisioned the College of New Jersey assuming a crucial role in
providing leadership to the new nation. Toward that end, he
launched the most extensive program of oratorical study in
revolutionary America. He taught Lectures on Eloquence, an
impressive introduction to the art of persuasion. He revved up
student philosophical societies to help train students in public
speaking. (And speak they did, gathering nightly to deliver
orations on free trade, civil disobedience and the horrors of war.)
He awarded honorary degrees to political figures, and played host
to future presidents and Supreme Court justices.

As much a practitioner as he was an educator, Witherspoon modeled
for his students the application of the lessons he imparted to
them. He personally delivered assistance to Gen. Washington and the
Continental Army. He spent five years in the Continental Congress,
serving on more than 100 committees. During a crucial debate over
the Articles of Confederation, he challenged Ben Franklin's claim
that a confederacy based on equal votes would soon expire. The
union must be agreed to now, Witherspoon argued, when all the
states faced a common enemy; otherwise, as the conflict deepened
they easily could lose heart. "Shall we establish nothing good,
because it cannot be eternal? Shall we live without government
because every constitution has its old age and its period?"

As an educator, Witherspoon's aim was to "fit young Gentlemen for
serving their Country in public Stations" and to place them "in
offices of power or trust." That goal was met. As a teacher of
theology and ethics, he naturally exerted much influence through
his students bound for the ministry. Of the 469 graduates of the
college during his presidency, 114 became pastors in churches
throughout the colonies.

Though significant, the number might have been larger. Before
Witherspoon's arrival, nearly 50 percent of all Princeton graduates
became ministers; by the end of his 25-year administration, only
half that many would so. The political crisis surely had much to do
with this, but so did the president's broad vision of Christian
vocation.

The result was that Reverend Witherspoon, an evangelical minister,
presided over the foremost school for statesmen at the most
strategic point in American history. Among his graduates was one
U.S. president (James Madison, B.A., 1771); a vice president (Aaron
Burr, B.A., 1772); 12 members of the Continental Congress; five
delegates to the Constitutional Convention; 49 U.S.
representatives; 28 U.S. senators; three Supreme Court Justices;
eight U.S. district judges; one secretary of state; three attorneys
general; and two foreign ministers. Another 26 served as state
judges, 17 as members of their state conventions that ratified the
proposed Constitution.

In August 1768 a somewhat austere Scottish minister arrived in
Princeton with his wife and five children. He found the main
college building, Nassau Hall, lit from top to bottom with candles
to greet him. Perhaps none of those who welcomed him could have
guessed that he would help set the campus ablaze with revolutionary
fervor. John Adams, writing on the eve of independence, feared that
"we have not Men, fit for the Times." But those men did in fact
appear, thanks in no small measure to this
preacher-cum-politician.

Given the flourishing of religion in America, it is easy to forget
that political liberalism in Europe came laced with antireligious
venom. It would not be so in the United States, and Witherspoon's
career was part of the reason. "It is in the man of piety …
that we may expect to find the uncorrupted patriot, the useful
citizen, and the invincible soldier," he said. "God grant in
America true religion and civil liberty may be inseparable and the
unjust attempts to destroy the one, may in the issue tend to the
support and establishment of both."